It went like all first attempts with a new recipe seem to go with me. The final product was pretty much alright but the journey there sure was hectic and messy.
We are all Food Network junkies in this house. One particular weekend or evening we pretty much left it on that channel all day. During our marathon we saw a Throwdown with Bobby Flay episode that featured Shrimp and Grits. It looked tasty. Next thing you know I find a recipe for it in My Southern Living magazine. So I decide to give it a whirl.
I spent about a week assembling the necessary ingredients and shopped around for a dutch oven to make it in. I gave up on the dutch oven and decided that was more for presentation than anything else and went ahead and made it for dinner last night. I thought about halving the recipe as it made 8 1/2 cups of grits but figured 4 1/4 cups might not be enough if the kids decided they like it. So I went ahead with the full recipe .... next time, unless we have company, I will definitely half it. I don't know if I did something wrong or what but I swear I had gallons upon gallons of grits! And guess what? The kids didn't like it. It's flavored with one clove of garlic and a dash of tobasco sauce and I think was too much for them. I thought it would be pretty diluted but it wasn't. Not strong, but definitely present. Next time I will leave out the garlic and add more cheddar cheese.
So I am waiting for my milk and water to boil so I can add the grits. I check on it, it doesn't even look close to boiling so I go to get some of the ingredients for the shrimp topping out of the fridge. In the 2 seconds it take me to walk to the refrigerator - the milk and water boil over! In this house I have an electric cooktop which I hate. There are two big burners and two small burners. It is one of those glass cooktops so if something boils over, I have to scrub the top with a special cleaner and pad. For last night's recipe I was going to need both of the big burners. So I transfer the boiling milk and water pot to the other large burner and try my best to clean the mess off the hot burner without setting anything on fire or inflicting too much pain on myself.
One disaster dealt with - back to cooking
The recipe calls for crumbled bacon as a topping. I am supposed to cook 5 strips of bacon. I do not cook bacon. I used to really never eat it except at restaurants so I never mastered the art of cooking it. David is a HUGE fan of bacon so when we have it, he is the one in charge of cooking it. But he's not home from work yet. So I go for it and yep - I burn it. The house is filled with smoke. I open the windows to air it out and at this point, David walks in. I just look at him and smile and say "There's a reason I don't ever cook bacon" and I get back to work.
I get through the rest with no major catastrophes. The only thing is the shrimp and mushroom topping kinda all sticks to the pan. In looking at the online recipe today, I see it calls for 2 tsp of oil and 1 cup of chicken broth. I'm going to have to look back at my magazine recipe - either those weren't listed or I missed 'em. Next time I'll be sure to add these two ingredients.
Like I said, all in all it turned out pretty good. It made one heck of a mess to clean up but my lovely husband helped out with that. I think I will make it again but I will change it up a little. I'll cut back on the mushrooms, I'm not a fan of mushrooms to start with and I ended up picking most of mine out. If I want the kids to eat any of it I will need to cut back on the garlic all around and perhaps add more cheese to the grits. And no matter what - I'm cutting down on the amount of grits .... unless I have a small army coming by. I swear - even with throwing some out, I am going to be eating grits for lunch for the next two weeks.
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